Post by Agpa on Sept 26, 2016 19:34:19 GMT 9
Hi!
My name is Agnieszka, I am from Poland, but for the last 8+ years I have lived in Denmark and Greenland with my boyfriend, who is Danish. I joined this forum last week. I was recommended Adam's book and some other books about raising bilingual children and I am slowly getting prepared. I have so far read 65% of the book and I enjoy it a lot.
Coming from a very monolingual family (where my parents refused to learn some English to communicate with my boyfriend), I have always had drive to learn languages on my own. When I met my boyfriend our main language was English (he revealed recently that one reason why he wanted to have a girlfriend with a different background than Danish was to improve his English skills), but within the first 2 years we smoothly did a transition to Danish.
Now we are expecting our first child (and hope we'll not end up with only one child) in the beginning of December. We always knew our child/children will have to speak both Danish and Polish, no matter where we live. I have many relatives in Poland, with whom we have a lot of contact. On the other hand, my boyfriend's family can be counted on one hand. I want my daughter to be able to talk with her grandparents, aunts, uncles, and all cousins. At first we planned I should talk Polish with our daughter, and my boyfriend should talk Danish, and we could talk English between each other. But later we concluded that we will maintain Danish between us, as I strive for achieving proficiency in that language and still work on pronunciation. I know it is not the most optimal scenario of raising the bilingual child, but that is what we have chosen.
I have already started reading some books aloud in Polish before going to bed, I have ordered some books that my mom will bring me when visiting me some weeks from now, including some of the fairy tales that belonged to me when I was child. I love reading, though reading aloud is a forgotten habit (I used to read to my younger sister who was quite resistant to reading herself) and it took me some time to get used to hearing my voice reading aloud. So far I do not have a big strategy: I will speak to our daughter in Polish, I have friends with small kids that live not far away, I keep regular contact with my family via Skype and other communication forms and I am going to use that medium also in the future. I am going to read aloud at least 15 minutes a day and if it will be possible I will enroll our daughter in the Polish school, probably not as a major educational institution, but on an afternoon/weekend basis or via internet.
I promised myself some years ago that when I have kids one day I wouldn't like them to fulfill my dreams and ambitions but their own, and sometimes I feel like establishing this strict agenda for achieving bilingualism is negating what I had promised myself...
